For more than a year now, Novell has been touting its " one Net " strategy, which promises to unite multiple networks under a single administrative umbrella.

It sounds wonderful. It can mean huge cost reductions, because it would mean IT personnel would be better able to manage a corporate network with common administrative policies that extend out to remote users, customers and business partners via the Internet, intranets and extranets.

If you ask network administrators to name their most frustrating tasks, one of the top three or four would include managing revolving user accounts in an often-massive infrastructure that enables network access, application access, network resource access and password management. For those unlucky souls, one Net could be a partial answer to their hectic lives.

In its marketing messages, Novell is focusing on information infrastructure consolidation, simplification and security. The cost savings that a company can realize by consolidating its IT efforts is enormous, in both time and money. Novell's technology is leading-edge, but its challenge is to get the vision of one Net and the one Net services messages believed and understood by those who purchase products.

In many instances, upper IT management dictate to IT personnel which solutions to implement. Contrary to popular belief, a sincere desire to make lives easier is one of the drivers in management’s purchasing decisions. However, the decisions are not always based on a thorough understanding of the technical or business issues involved. Novell has not been successful at reaching these decision-makers. Novell marketing messages have been focused on technical features rather than addressing how one Net can alleviate the pain being felt by many of their customers. Concerns with security, overloaded IT personnel, budget constraints and difficulties in implementing e-business projects should all sound familiar to many of you in IT.

Can Novell bail you out? Much of the answer depends on your faith in Novell’s survival. Depending on which estimates you read, Novell's legacy NetWare installed base may be shrinking. Based upon this, some perceive Novell as a sinking ship. However, before buying into that idea, consider this: many of Novell's Net Services products, which support its vision of One Net, are centered on Novell's eDirectory. This enterprise-class network directory runs natively on such platforms as Windows 2000, Sun Solaris and Linux. Novell's NetWare file and print platform is nowhere to be seen when NDS eDirectory is running on other platforms. In addition, you should consider the 130 million-plus user accounts managed via NDS eDirectory on these various platforms.

It appears that Novell is heading in the right direction in terms of its technical focus of enabling corporations to utilize a well-established directory to manage their network resources and to consolidate operations. Novell can provide this without forcing a commitment to NetWare.

Back to Novell one Net. With Novell Directory Services eDirectory, DirXML, iFolder, iChain, Single Sign On and other Novell products, Novell is well placed to back up its one Net message. Novell is also building a consulting service foundation to support the implementation of these technologies. For example, eDirectory can be implemented across Windows NT and NetWare inside a firewall. It can also be impleemented on Solaris outside the firewall. Then, the logon process can be drastically simplified by using Novell Single Sign On to manage the logon process across all three platforms. This represents huge time/cost savings. These are products being implemented today.

Is all of this one Net consolidation feasible? Does anyone really care? With a possible economic downturn, companies are now being forced to look for ways to save money. They could do so by extending the life of their existing infrastructure. Another option is to reduce network administration costs. One Net offers hope in both dimensions.

The challenges for Novell are to build positive perceptions about its future and to convince decision-makers that they should adopt Novell technologies to consolidate, secure and simplify their networking infrastructure. Novell must also keep the focus on consistent messaging, building positive perceptions about its future and delivering quality products.

The bottom line: Is Novell dead? Not by a long shot!

» posted by ITworld staff

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